In 2019, The Media Has to Do Better in Calling Out Trump's Shit

In the light of a brand new year, I have one simple wish: Big news organizations need to do a better job treating the President like the liar that he is.

That he’s a liar isn’t a revelation, I know. News organizations have done an amazing job at tracking his lies (the Washington Post clocks him at 7,645 (!!!) since he took office, though it’s probably higher since this was published), at fact checking his lies (Politifact ranks only 5 percent of his statements as true), at debating whether they should call them lies (“intent is key” decided NPR), and at inventing ranking systems to describe the volume of his lies (meet the “bottomless Pinnochio”). That’s all good stuff.

The Latest: White House says court filings show nothing new.

(This court filing literally named the president as “Individual-1” in the Stormy Daniels payoff.)

Sure, “Jackhole McWhiteguy Says Some Bullshit” is headline construction 101, but this particular jackhole is 7,000 lies and two years deep in a four-year presidency, and simply foregrounding what he says as if that’s enough is undermining otherwise good work.

“Jackhole McWhiteguy Says Some Bullshit”

I know there’s a built-in deference for the office, but when the holder of this particular office sends a series of unhinged tweets spouting laughably untrue fuckery, or takes questions outside Marine One and just spouts nonsense, or goes on a half-truth ramblefest at a cabinet meeting and the initial headlines and tweets that get sent out more often than not just follow traditionally “Jackhole Says” structure? Well, everyone gets screwed over. Especially the reporters doing good work because they get jackholes like me yelling at them on Twitter.

And that’s too bad because, especially at big media organizations, it’s rare that reporters are writing their headlines, and they’re basically never crafting the corporate account’s tweets, so they’re left holding a shit sandwich that they didn’t even make. And yet over and over and over again that shit sandwich is being served up.

It’s dumb and most journalists—especially those that have to regularly cross paths with this clownshow administration—know it’s dumb. As journalism thinker Jay Rosen wrote almost a decade ago, “American journalism is dumber than most journalists.” We’re living through a real dumb period.

The Washington PostGetty Images

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That's because there’s always the misdirected winds of "journalistic objectivity" and "balance" pushing everything right back to the middle, despite the regular trips to Bananatown that this administration takes us on—most recently this Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting that featured the president's 45 minutes of freestyle riffage (which sounds a lot cooler than it was).

The forces of objectivity and balance are the driving forces of traditional journalism and that’s a good thing. The hellscape we currently occupy would be significantly worse if everything was as skewed as Fox News. Plus, big news orgs balanced approach to reporting has created a lot of actual heroes, so thank you for your service and all that.

Of course, being objective doesn't mean letting liars lie. “Balance” isn’t setting two pundits up to argue over what everyone knows is a false statement. There’s no bias in saying something is patently untrue if it is, in fact, patently untrue. In fact, saying things aren’t true from jump is kinda the most important part of the job.

Being objective doesn't mean letting liars lie.

There’s one school of thought floating around that says he’s not trying to actively deceive you, and another that says he’s not lying because he believes his own bullshit. And, sure, maybe he just lost the thread halfway through Fox and Friends and is lumping half-remembered shit into a weird ball of mangled memory goop. Or maybe he never knew something to begin with. But it is psychologically impossible for him to say, “I don’t know.”

But does it really matter? Either way, the man rarely says anything resembling the truth. Again, he’s amassed more than 7,000 documented untruths at this point; what’s the threshold for when we should question every headline that starts, “The White House says”?

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It’s time, this year, in 2019—as we gear up for another godforsaken presidential election next year—to get this right. There aren’t “both sides” when one side can’t stop lying. There aren’t “differences of opinions” when one opinion is repeatedly, provably false. And there’s not “debate” when the thing you’re debating is built on lies.

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Because not calling a liar a liar is how we got here in the first place (I mean someone did and she got called "unlikable"for it—thank God we’re not going to repeat that) and we’re going to end up here again unless we all learn from our mistakes and change it up this time. It’s a new year! How about a fresh start?

Dan Sinker is a journalist, cultural critic, and talks about politics on the "Says Who" podcast.